William W. Johnstone (11 page)
Read William W. Johnstone Online
Authors: Savage Texas
Monty and two other dead men were loaded into the travois, cradled in its hammock-like concavity. They were tied in place to keep them from falling out.
The travois was without wheels, the draft horse literally dragging it behind itself. For all that, it was remarkably effective in transporting a load of over five hundred pounds across the terrain.
The group traveled at the rate of its slowest element, the horse pulling the travois.
It proceeded at a walk. The travois kicked up a fair amount of dust; that couldn’t be helped. But the effect of the telltale dust cloud would be minimized within the Breaks, whose rock walls would screen its source.
The procession filed into the eastern pass of Wild Horse Gulch. Ridges and cliffs blocked the sun, filling the gulch with cool blue shadows.
The men had filled their canteens with fresh water and packed a quantity of beef jerky for the trip. Luke augmented his firepower with a sawed-off shotgun and a leather pouch filled with twelve-gauge buckshot shells that had belonged to one of Monty’s gang.
After a few hundred yards, the eastern approach opened up into the gulch proper, a parklike space encompassing many square miles of well-watered grasslands. Rolling fields were dotted with groups of wild horses, stallions, mares, colts. They looked up from their grazing to eye the intruders, running away well before the strangers neared them. Mustangs are wary of men and devilishly hard to catch.
Johnny Cross continually scanned the landscape. Danger could come from any direction—probably from the one least expected. The file rode north along the foot of a rocky ridge running north-south.
Shadows provided cover as well as welcome relief from the steadily mounting heat. Springs in the hills spilling down the slopes, becoming brooks and streams on the flat, watering tall green grass.
The horses plodded along. Limestone deposits and rock formations took fanciful shapes: a castle tower, a crouching beast, a ship’s prow. That last was a wedge-shaped protuberance on the gulch’s western wall, jutting out into space several hundred feet above the canyon floor.
It was the landmark Johnny had been looking for. “The Snake Pit’s yonder on the far side of the gulch,” he said.
He, Luke, and the horses with their morbid burdens turned left, striking west across the gulch. The sun showed over the top of the eastern cliffs, filling the gulch with buttery yellow light and heat.
Opposite, on the west wall, the promontory shaped like a ship’s bow was a marquee pointing to a gap in the rock walls. “Signpost to the Snake Pit,” Johnny said.
“Ain’t likely to forget it,” Luke said, nodding. “Sure is different from the war, eh, Johnny? Back then we never had to clean up what we killed, just left ’em laying where they fell.”
“Peacetime’s shaping up as a whole lot of extra work,” Johnny said.
They rode into a ravine below the ship’s-bow stone marker. It began as a narrow, sandy-floored cleft in rock with sandy floor, barely wide enough for the travois to make its way through, sometimes pressing close to the sides at the base of the fan-shaped carrier. The dust had a flinty smell.
The ravine wormed its way through rock walls. They began to part, opening outward from each other. The corridor gave on to a pocket valley. It was dry, waterless. Stony soil was covered with thin, short, colorless grass. Mesquite trees, gnarly and twisted, dotted the rocky flat. There were clumps of prickly-pear cactus, too.
“Watch out for rattlers,” Johnny said.
“Ain’t nothing but rattlers in this hole,” Luke said, with feeling.
At the far end of the valley, a slanting boulder twelve feet high sheered off from a rocky ridge. It was shaped like a hard-boiled egg standing upright, with its wider end half-buried in the ground and with one side sliced off at a slanted angle.
Johnny and Luke rode toward it, carefully eyeing the ground ahead for rattlesnakes. This was prime rattlersnake country. A rattler could spook a horse, cause it to panic, maybe blindly step into a rabbit hole, stumble and break a leg.
Nearing the slanted rock, it could be seen that at its base gaped a big hole.
Horse nostrils quivered, widening, getting the scent of snake. The animals grew skittish. Johnny reined in a stone’s-throw from the hole, near a clump of stunted mesquite trees little bigger than bushes. “This is as far as the horses will go,” he said.
The hole in the ground was a sinkhole, a natural vertical shaft in the limestone rock about ten feet in diameter and fifty feet deep. The Snake Pit—a den of rattlesnakes.
Rattlers thronged the stony ground ringing the hole, sunning themselves. They looked like several dozen separate lengths of thick, yellow-brown rope strewn carelessly about the rocks, except that they were moving.
Johnny and Luke got down off their horses and hitched them to the trees, making sure they were tied good and tight so the horses couldn’t break away. Johnny loosed his carbine from the saddle-scabbard and handed it to Luke. “You see any rattlers coming this way, shoot ’em before they get close,” he said.
“I sure will!” Luke declared.
Johnny used his knife to cut one of the dead men loose from a horse. The body hit the ground with a thud. Another followed. He cut the ropes binding the other three corpses to the travois and rolled them out of it onto the ground.
He pulled on a pair of riding gloves, fitting his hands into them. He bent down over the bodies, lining them up with their feet pointed toward the hole. Luke with his crutch and wooden leg was no good for this kind of work. Johnny did it by himself.
Luke stood guard, facing the sinkhole, holding the carbine in one hand. Johnny finished arranging the bodies to his liking and straightened up. He’d worked up a pretty good sweat. He used his bandanna to wipe his brow.
A rattlesnake as thick around the middle as a young girl’s arm separated itself from the group around the hole and started wriggling toward the clump of mesquite trees. Its triangular head rose up from the ground as it moved forward.
A shot cracked. The rattler’s head exploded.
Smoke curled from the muzzle of the carbine. Luke had fired holding the weapon in one hand, pointing and shooting with seeming casualness.
“Nice shot,” Johnny said.
“I may not be no pistol fighter, but I’m a fair hand with a rifle,” Luke said.
Those unfortunate enough to have disturbed a hornet’s nest know the unforgettable sound of the hive buzzing in mounting fury. The sinister sound of a rattlesnake rattling its rattles is of an order several degrees of magnitude greater in its chilling menace.
Nature, which has equipped the rattler with venom sacs loaded with deadly poison and gleaming, sharp-pointed fangs to inject it has thoughtfully equipped it with rattles at the end of its tail. When the reptile’s ire is roused, its rattle warns:
I’m dangerous! Beware!
I’m dangerous! Beware!
Now, not one, but many rattlesnakes around the sinkhole reared up, wedge-shaped heads weaving, beady eyes glittering, tails agitating their buzzing rattles. They sounded like a rhythm section of percussionists for a mariachi band simultaneously shaking their maracas.
Something primal in that rattling drone, instinctive, to make the hair stand up on the back of a man’s neck, send shivers up and down his spine, and chill his blood.
Johnny held a pair of loaded revolvers he’d taken from a saddlebag, these in addition to the twin guns worn holstered on his hips.
“Here they come!” Luke warned. He took up a wide stance, bracing himself solidly on the crutch so he’d be able to use both hands to work the carbine fast.
Rattlesnakes arrowed away from the hole toward the clump of mesquite trees where the men and horses were grouped. They were swollen with venom and hostility.
“They’re moving fast,” Luke said tightly.
“Let ’em have it,” Johnny said, opening up with the pistols. He pointed a gun at the nearest rattler coiling toward him and squeezed the trigger. The flat crack of the report sounded simultaneously with the rattler’s head disintegrating into pulp. Its long, looping body writhed and spasmed, a living whip being wielded by an invisible hand.
The carbine spat, tagging another rattler in the body, slamming it sideways. More rattlesnakes came on, six, twelve, more.
Johnny squared off against the venomous horde, firing first with the gun in his right hand, then with his left, covering a wide angle of approach. Hot lead pulverized snake flesh, spraying corrosive mist into the air.
Luke wielded the carbine, potting away at the plague of reptiles. As the lead snakes halved the distance between them and the men, shots came in rapid succession, sending up their own lethal chorus of rattling gunfire.
A rattler slithering in from the side managed to get within a man’s length of Johnny and Luke. It reared, wicked yellow eyes glaring, open maw gaping to display a double set of wickedly close fangs. It was so close that the droplets of venom beading on the needle-sharp tips of curved fangs could be seen.
Johnny placed a shot right between its horns, taking off the top of its head. The monster rattler continued writhing and whipsawing on the ground, minus its forward motion and hostile intent.
“That was too close for comfort!” Luke shouted.
The wave of advancing rattlers was checked by gunfire, broken. The terrible thing was that even after being shot dead, some of the reptiles continued to move, spasming convulsively.
With a dozen or more of their number shot into pieces—though the pieces continued moving—the surviving rattlesnakes got the message that their attack meant death. They peeled off to the sides, scattering, fleeing the area of the sinkhole.
It was a sullen, furious exodus of rattlesnakes, slithering and S-curving away from the shooters, darting into rockpiles and disappearing into clumps of tall, yellow-gray grasses.
Johnny squeezed off some more rounds, driving off some of the stragglers. The ground before them was littered with sections and coils of the reptiles, most of them still jerking with the convulsive half-life of spasmodic muscular reaction.
There was a lull in the shooting. Johnny and Luke exchanged glances. Luke’s eyes were bulging in a face shiny with cold sweat. Johnny wondered if he looked the same.
Luke rubbed his face in the crook of an arm, using the sleeve of his jacket to wipe the stinging sweat from his eyes. “They heads is blowed clean off and they still ain’t got enough sense to know that they’re dead. Must be pure meanness that keeps ’em going,” he said.
“Like us,” said Johnny. He stuck the two guns in the top of the gun belt, freeing his hands.
The horses were anxious, upset. Pointed ears stood straight up. Hooves pawed the ground. The animals danced, sidling. It wasn’t the noise and violence of gunfire that had done it, it was the smell of the snakes and the buzzing of their rattles that had sounded deep wells of unease somewhere in the depths of their brains.
Johnny went to the chestnut, speaking softly to it. “Easy, boy, easy. Ain’t nothing to get on your hind legs about.” The horse quieted some at the sound of his voice. He patted its corded muscular neck, stroking it.
Luke examined the carbine. “I only got a few shots left.” Johnny opened a pouch in the saddlebag on the horse’s left side, taking out a box of cartridges for the carbine. He went to Luke, handing it to him. Luke tore open one end of the box and began feeding rounds into the weapon’s receiver.
Johnny set about quieting the other horses. Luke finished reloading. Johnny set the two extra guns aside. The guns in his twin holsters were both fully loaded.
“The way to the Snake Pit is clear. Might as well start getting shut of the bodies,” Johnny said. “Cover me.”
“You’re covered,” Luke said.
Johnny went around the row of bodies, so that he was between them and the sinkhole. “Save Monty for last. I want to enjoy his company for a while,” Luke said.
Johnny tsk-tsked. “Like I said—pure meanness.”
“I had a lot of time to think about Monty while I was humping my way along the road to Hangtown without my wooden leg.”
“Never mind about him, you keep your eyes open for any rattlers coming at me.”
“We must have run them out clear into the next county.”
“Keep watching anyway.” Johnny bent down, taking hold of one of the dead men’s booted ankles. He started toward the sinkhole, dragging the body along with him.
The ground was littered with dead rattlesnakes and splattered with snake blood, venom, and bits of flesh. Severed snake sections continued to writhe and jerk.
Johnny dragged the body to the rim of the shaft, stepping carefully as he neared the edge. Not too near, though, lest the hard, sunbaked earth crumble underfoot and hurl him down to the bottom of the hole.
A flash of memory recalled to him days of his youth when he and Cal and Luke and some of the other venturesome companions of his boyhood would vie to see who could get closest to the sinkhole’s edge. In those days, there were no bullets and powder to waste on frivolities like killing rattlesnakes for fun. They’d driven them off with firecrackers, homemade bows and arrows, thrown rocks, slingshots, sometimes even forked or pointed sticks.
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